Items produced in a manufacturing environment will typically be stored in a warehouse for shipping at a later date. A shipping warehouse will typically house a plurality of products, which are made by differing processes or have different characteristics. This collection of warehouse items may be referred to as the ‘field’. The field can be substantially large and therefore may be organized into a set of defined locations resembling a ‘grid’. The warehouse items are placed at appropriate locations within the grid and these locations are recorded, creating a mapping of the items for subsequent rearrangement or retrieval. A shipping order will typically comprise a combination of dissimilar items from this field requiring this combination of items to be located and collected to complete the shipping order. This shipping order is sometimes referred to as a shipping manifest or lift ticket. Further to gathering items for a shipping order, it may be necessary or beneficial to rearrange or move around the items in the field to optimize floor space or to enable a more efficient arrangement of the items.
When the items manufactured are of substantial dimension and weight, it is typically necessary to retrieve the items from the field using an overhead crane or similar device capable of lifting and transporting items of such dimension and weight. The use of an overhead crane requires the operator of the crane to either be placed at a remote location relative to the field (in the cab of a crane for example) or to operate the crane with a remote control device at field level. When the operator is at a remote distance, the operator may be unable to distinguish between items in the field that are required for a given shipping order. This situation is of particular concern where items are of similar shape but different characteristics, such as in the steel industry where coils of stock that are produced with differing specifications appear similar, especially when viewed from a distance. If the operator uses a remote control device to operate the crane, navigating the field while moving the crane, and reading and scanning the items becomes quite cumbersome for one person. Furthermore, the use of one person at the field level to control the crane, identify the items of interest and scan the item becomes cumbersome due the need for multiple devices to both control the crane and scan the item.
If the crane operator is remotely located relative to the field, a second individual is required to identify the existence and position of the desired items at the field level, to scan the desired items and communicate this information to the operator. The communication between the two individuals is required to identify the item of interest for rearrangement or shipping purposes.
The use of two individuals to gather items in a shipping order tends to be both inefficient and labour intensive given the task to be completed. In the steel industry where the items in the field are of substantial size and weight, the individual assigned to track the appropriate items at the field level would find the method of scanning to be not only time consuming but also dangerous. The inadvertent movement of large items on the field poses a threat to the safety of the individual at the field level and the large area of the field does not lend itself to an efficient method for identifying the desired items in the shipping order.
In the steel industry where the items in the field are large coils, typically the individual at the field level manually scans a barcode found on a tag affixed to the coil. This introduces a possibility for human error. The human error can lead to the processing of incorrect coils, which could possibly generate an incorrect shipment to the customer. Further to the time-related inefficiencies and inherent safety risk, the use of a field level individual requires additional floor space for the above-mentioned navigation of the field. By eliminating the use of a floor operator, less floor space would be required. This is due to a reduction in the required size of the lane ways between adjacent coils. Space is then only required to accommodate the jaws of the crane's picker. This requires an apparatus capable of viewing the field from a distance.
To remotely view labels and barcodes, it has been known to use a camera mounted in a fixed position whereby movement of an item into the field-of-view of the camera allows for remote viewing of a label. This method however requires the position of the labels to be known and the correct item to have been picked by the crane in advance of the camera scan.
Another method of reading labels and barcodes remotely involves a moveable camera capable of tilting, panning and zooming to focus on a desired label or barcode. This method however, requires additional operations to be manually executed by the operator of the crane to identify not only the item of interest but also to correctly centre and zoom in on the label for reading. These additional operator interactions impose an additional opportunity for human error.
It is therefore an object of the present invention to provide a method and apparatus to obviate or mitigate the above disadvantages.